We WILL Save the Magnificent Arlington Confederate Memorial
Letter from Our Attorney to Secretary of Defense Austin and Others
Several “serious regulatory violations” by the Federal Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery
[Publisher’s Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. – We will not allow the Woke naming commission to desecrate Arlington National Cemetery. We all love ANC. It belongs to all Americans.
The naming commission came about because of Elizabeth Warren’s legislation mandating destruction of Southern history in our military – as she interprets it – from the Confederate era. This is not peer-reviewed history that is openly debated by both sides but filthy politics. This is EXACTLY what Orwell warned about in his great novel 1984 when he wrote:
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
In fairness to Warren, Republican Jim Inhofe was head of the Senate Armed Services Committee at the time and Republicans had a majority. He could have stopped Warren as President Trump wanted but Inhofe is as characterless as Warren. He promised President Trump he would stop Warren’s hate legislation but he lied. It is UNBELIEVABLY frustrating when Republicans prove they are the Stupid Party and go against their own voters to give the likes of Elizabeth Warren a political victory.
Without a doubt, this wokeness and Woke naming commission has made our military weaker and more divided for no reason. Changing base names and the names of streets, patches, destroying monuments, etc. is a waste of millions of dollars of taxpayer money at a time when we are running huge budget deficits. The changes do nothing but divide us just like Austin’s standdown and search for extremists in the military who don’t exist, and his promotion of Critical Race Theory and other racist fads.
The Woke naming commission sends a clear message to Southerners that they can bleed and die but they are not welcome unless they denounce their own families as traitors, which is not true. New England threatened to secede multiple times in the antebellum days such as in the War of 1812 and with the admission of Texas. Anything that reduced New England political power caused them to threaten secession, the right of which nobody questioned at the time. West Point made it clear and taught the right of secession in the antebellum days. Our country was founded on secession from the British Empire. Our Declaration of Independence is the greatest ordinance of secession ever written.
Southerners were correct with everything they did. They were fed up with Yankees sending terrorists into the South to murder them and their families so they called conventions, such as the Founding Fathers established with the Constitutional Convention and state ratification conventions, they debated the issue of secession then voted on it. It was pure democracy such as the Founding Fathers envisioned.
Southerners expected to live in peace but the North with four times the white population of the South and perhaps 200 times the arms decided they were not going to allow a free trade nation with warm water ports and 100% control of the most demanded commodity on the planet, cotton, to rise up on their Southern border.
Lincoln knew that the moment Southerners signed trade and military treaties with Great Britain and other Europeans powers, the North would not be able to beat the South in a war, so he sent five military missions into the South in March and April, 1861 to get one started as quickly as he could. He announced his blockade before the smoke cleared from the bombardment of Fort Sumter, which was his purpose all along. He knew that would chill European support for the South and make Europe take a wait-and-see attitude.
Lincoln made it crystal clear through 1) the War Aims Resolution, 2) his support for the Corwin Amendment that left black people in slavery forever where slavery already existed, 3) the fact that six slave states fought for the Union the entire war, 4) etc. etc., that the North did not go to war to end slavery. They went to war to continue the economic domination of the country and eliminate a powerful Southern competitor.
That’s why Abraham Lincoln said over and over that the war was fought for the preservation of the Union, which guaranteed the North’s political domination due to its much larger population. Still, in 1860, 61% of the country voted against Abraham Lincoln.
I am not against some of the names suggested for military bases but put them on new bases and new weapons and such. Do not destroy the old. It is not necessary to destroy the old. We are supposed to be inclusionary. Remember the “inclusion” part of diversity, equity and inclusion? Destroying the old using the idiotic, goofy standards of today tears at the fabric of our country. It is false history, it costs enormous amounts of money and divides us for no reason other than to allow Elizabeth Warren to signal her “virtue”1 and for the benefit of evil politicians who think hate and anarchy will somehow benefit them.
Our military in the not too distant past looked up to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee because they were brilliant military leaders. We had nuclear submarines named for Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson during the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. President Dwight D. Eisenhower kept a picture of Lee in his White House office the whole time he was president. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander of World War II, when important bases in the South like Fort Bragg and Fort Benning trained our men and women to go fight and win and if need be, die, certainly knew more than Elizabeth Warren and the Woke political naming commission.
Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and all other presidents until the rise of the Communist-style division of today, admired Gen. Lee, not just as a military leader but as a man of great character who worked hard to reconcile North and South and bring our great nation back together after a war in which 750,000 died and over a million were maimed. In World War II we lost 400,000 out of a population nearly five times larger.
The naming commission is so inept it does not even mention the reconciliation theme and symbolism of the Confederate Memorial though Arlington National Cemetery itself, does. ANC’s own description in its National Register of Historic Places Registration Form for the Historic District received by the National Park Service February 24, 2014 states over and over that the Confederate Memorial symbolizes the reconciliation and reunification of our great country after our country’s bloodiest war.2
How could the naming commission ignore that?
The Confederate Memorial was conceived by Union soldier and President William McKinley after enthusiastic Southern participation in the Spanish-American War. President William Howard Taft spoke at the UDC ceremony the evening the cornerstone was laid giving an inspiring well-received speech. President Woodrow Wilson spoke at the dedication June 4, 1914 as did Union and Confederate Veterans. Remember, these were the days of the 50th and 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and the famous handshakes across the wall by the old Union and Confederate gentlemen.
How could the naming commission not care about all that?
It proves that the Confederate Memorial is about reconciliation therefore it is not in the Woke naming commission’s remit. The Confederate Memorial does not commemorate the Confederacy. It commemorates the reunification of the United States of America after a bloody war. See my white paper The Reconciliation of North and South After the War Between the States as Symbolized by the Confederate Memorial “New South” in Arlington National Cemetery on Defend Arlington’s website, 28 pages on the theme of reconciliation.
The 109 year old Confederate Memorial was created in the city of Rome, Italy by internationally acclaimed Jewish sculptor Moses Ezekiel but the naming commission wants to tear it apart in the cheapest way possible and leave a mangled shaft sticking up in Arlington National Cemetery.
The white paper by Ernest E. Blevins, who is the foremost national expert on Union and Confederate monuments, is entitled: “Headstone of the Confederate States: Moses Ezekiel’s Arlington Confederate Monument, Symbolism, Meaning, National Register Eligibility, and Potential Adverse Effects to Alternations or Removal.” It is 49 pages, detailed, documented and irrefutable.
Blevins discusses the “monument symbology” that “depicts the South’s mourning and the war’s losses” and he includes a comment from Michael Robert Patterson:
But no sculptor, as far as known, has ever, in any one memorial told as much history as has Ezekiel in his monument at Arlington; and every human figure in it, as well as every symbol, is in and of itself a work of art.3
That comment again points out the crime against history and art committed by the Woke naming commission in its desire to destroy the monument as cheaply as possible and leave a mangled shaft in its place in Arlington National Cemetery surrounded by 500 graves of Southern soldiers in concentric circles.
Esteemed British art critic and historian, Alexander Adams, writes that “four soldiers are buried at its base” and “include Civil War Soldier and sculptor Corporal Moses Ezekiel . . . ” therefore “The Memorial is an actual grave marker, marking the burial site of dead soldiers, and is located in the National Cemetery, making it a functional or symbolic grave marker. It is therefore outside the remit of the Naming Commission.”4
About its artistic significance, Adams writes:
Having viewed a large amount of public statuary from the beaux-arts era (1850-1914), it is my professional opinion that the Memorial is a serious, iconographically complex and technically accomplished piece of art. It my view, it is a handsome sculpture and an entirely appropriate funerary monument. I consider it an internationally significant piece of art of its type and era. Any nation should be proud to host such a magnanimous and dignified monument.”5
Adams also notes that:
[I]t is rare for a nation to mark the sacrifices and loses of the losing side in a civil war. This makes the Memorial internationally significant, as an example of the exceptional history of the USA and the efforts to reconcile the sides after the Civil War. It shows black and white soldiers working together, overturning expectations and putting [on] the record the complexity of historical fact, which it is not our generation’s place to suppress.6
The naming commission prefers a mangled shaft created in the cheapest way possible marking the graves of hundreds of Southerners, which would desecrate Arlington National Cemetery for eternity.
To allow a mangled shaft to mark Southern graves in our nation’s most sacred burial ground dishonors every Southern state and all the Southerners who fought with great valor and died in defense of our country in every later war, many of whom are buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
It is pretty stupid during a military recruiting crisis caused by Woke policies to insult the region from where 44% of our military is recruited.
Below, is a powerful letter from Defend Arlington’s attorney and partner in her Washington, D.C. law firm, Karen C. Bennett. She is one of the best in the country on litigation involving historic properties and federal rules and regulations.
We can win this fight and save the magnificent Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery and strike a hard blow against Woke ignorance and iconoclasm once and for all but WE NEED MONEY and time is of the essence.
Below, there are links to where you can donate.
EVERY SCV CAMP and UDC CHAPTER and all organizations that care about American history must give NOW to the utmost. We are in a war that we can win but we must act now.
Below, are also links to all the PDF white papers gathered together by Defend Arlington including Karen Bennett’s letter below. Send Bennett’s letter to your Congressional representatives ASAP.
It is powerful to send a note with a PDF of Alexander Adams’s testimonial since he is an international expert and his testimonial is just a few pages. Send it with Karen Bennett’s letter.
Remember what President William McKinley, a former Union soldier who came up with the idea for the Confederate Memorial, said about those Southern graves surrounding the monument:
. . . every soldier’s grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor . . . And the time has now come . . . when in the spirit of fraternity we should share in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers . . . The cordial feeling now happily existing between the North and South prompts this gracious act and if it needed further justification it is found in the gallant loyalty to the Union and the flag so conspicuously shown in this year just passed by the sons and grandsons of those heroic dead.
If you are descended from any of the 500 people buried in the graves in the concentric circles around the monument please contact us. Please forward this email and encourage people to get on our mailing list. We have the names, ranks, units, etc. of the 500 Southerners buried in concentric circles around the monument. We have it in a data file but I will publish all of them in the next few days.]
Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP
Karen C. BennettDecember 27, 2022
Lloyd J. Austin, IIIRe: Federal Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery
We write to express our concerns with serious regulatory violations occurring at the November 7-8, 2022, meeting of the Federal Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery (FACANC). The Department of Defense, through the Department of the Army, is charged with ensuring the FACANC’s compliance with the requirement of the Federal Advisory Committee Act.7 The Department of the Army, to whom the Committee reports, shall take steps to remedy these serious regulatory violations as set forth below.
Defend Arlington Cemetery is a coalition of stakeholders interested in the protection of the Reconciliation Memorial in the Arlington National Cemetery (ANC). Coalition members participated in the Nov. 7-8 FACANC meeting, submitted written comments, and obtained permission to address the Committee during the public comment period.
We write to express our concern with the Department of the Army’s, Designated Federal Officer’s interference with FACANC deliberations as the Department of Defense prepares to remove a significant historical Memorial from our nation’s most sacred military cemetery. On November 7-8, 2022, the FACANC met to discuss, among other things, implementation of the Naming Commission’s recommendations, specifically, the removal of the Memorial honoring the Confederate dead.8 The public meeting was announced on October 21, 2022, consistent with procedures under the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 (5 U.S.C. 552b) (FACA).9 Members of Defenders of Arlington Cemetery provided written comments to the FACANC and other members registered, consistent with procedures outlined in the notice, to provide verbal comment at the open meeting.10 Notwithstanding over 320 pages objecting to removal11, the FACANC decided not to respond or provide any advice regarding the Naming Commission recommendation. Even worse, without any explanation, the FACANC refused to allow those members of the public that had properly registered to appear before the FACANC, denying them their right to speak and ensuring their opposition would not be included in the official meeting record. The FACANC’s silence is disappointing and fails to meet congressional expectations under the FACANC’s Charter. The FACANC’s decision to prohibit public speech is a violation of the federal law that governs how Congressionally established advisory committees exercise their functions.12 Congress charged the Department of Defense, through the Secretary of the Army, with ensuring the FACANC’s actions are consistent with the FACA. The Secretary of the Army should reconvene the FACANC for the purpose of providing the public with an opportunity to address the Committee consistent with expectations established in the October 21, 2022 meeting announcement.
Congress established the FACANC to provide the Secretary of Defense with independent advice or recommendations on matters including the erection of memorials in ANC.13 The Secretary’s approval of the Naming Commission recommendation to remove the Memorial honoring our national great reconciliation following the Civil War falls squarely within the FACANC’s purpose. During the November 8 meeting, FACANC members raised concerns with the decision to remove the Memorial. The Designated Federal Officer (DFO) responded that the decision to remove the Memorial had already been made and that there was no opportunity for the FACANC’s input to the Secretary. We were shocked to hear the DFO provide the Committee with such substantive direction. DoD regulations are clear that a DFO’s responsibility is purely administrative, limited calling meeting, approving agendas, adjourning where the public interest requires and, if directed, assuming the role of Chair14. We strongly believe that without the strong direction of the DFO that “this is already decided” the FACANC would have continued its deliberations and may very likely have decided an advisory report responding to the Secretary’s approval of the Naming Commission’s recommendation was warranted. The DFO’s inappropriate actions shut down further discussion and influenced the outcome, causing the FACANC to erroneously conclude that there was no opportunity to perform its congressionally assigned advisory role.
The FACANC’s decision not to allow properly registered members of the public speak at the meeting is a violation of DoD’s regulations at 41 C.F.R. 102-3.140(d) that provide “any member of the public may speak, if an agency’s guidelines so permit.” In this case, procedures for registration to address the FACANC were provided in the Oct. 21, 2022 meeting announcement. Members of Defenders of Arlington Cemetery, among others, submitted and received confirmation of the request to speak. However, without explanation, Committee Co-Chairs, Peake and Edwards, decided not to allow any registrants to speak. Not only did the Committee act in violation of the governing regulations, but the public was denied its right to be heard and have its voice registered in the meeting record. Department of the Army legal counsel in attendance at the meeting failed to raise concerns that the Committee’s decision violated the regulations governing FACA obligations.
The Department of the Army, to whom the Committee reports, shall take immediate steps to remedy the foregoing serious regulatory violations.
Sincerely,
/s/ Karen C. Bennett
Karen C. Bennett ofcc:
Lt. General James PeakeHere is a link to Defend Arlington’s donation page that states:
CHIP IN FOR THE ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY MEMORIAL LITIGATION DEFENSE FUND
Please Donate Money — THANK YOU!
Here is a link to an informative nine minute video, “The Arlington Confederate Monument,” produced by the Abbeville Institute.
The Arlington Confederate Monument
Here is a link to the outstanding scholarly PDF white papers written for Defend Arlington. You can download them all with one click. Please share them far and wide, especially the letter from Defend Arlington’s attorney, Karen C. Bennett, to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
PDF White Papers from Defend Arlington
Here is link to an excellent video refuting point by point a historically false Prager University video by Ty Seidule, who is on the naming commission. This one is produced by Bode Lang and entitled “The Civil War Was Not for Slavery.”
Click Here for Bode Lang’s excellent video,
1 Elizabeth Warren has no virtue. She knows nothing about Southern history and perhaps even less about her own: “. . . Warren held herself out as Native American, allowing Harvard Law School to use her as cover for its impotent diversity efforts” and:
According to a much-cited investigation by the Boston Globe, Warren consistently checked “white” on personnel forms throughout her career, including in 1981, 1985, and 1998 while employed at the University of Texas. But in the 1986-1987 edition of the Association of American Law School’s directory and eight subsequent editions, Warren listed herself as a minority. She began identifying as Native American on personnel forms three years into her post at the University of Pennsylvania. And while multiple professors have attested to the fact that Warren was considered white during the hiring process at Harvard University, in 1995 she self-identified as Native American, and the school’s statistics were updated to reflect as much. Harvard recorded Warren as Native American from 1995 to 2004. [https://theintercept.com/2018/10/16/elizabeth-warren-dna-video-native-american-harvard/, accessed 12-3-22]
2 That registration was approved for the property’s entry onto the National Register of Historic Places April 11, 2014.
3 Patterson, https://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/history-of-the-csa-memorial-at-anc-1914.htm.
4 Alexander Adams, “Testimony regarding Arlington National Cemetery Confederate Memorial submitted to the Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery Open Secession, 7-8 November 2022.” Adams’s source is Arlington National Cemetery’s National Register of Historic Places Registration Form for the Historic District received by the National Park Service February 24, 2014, mentioned above. It was approved for the property’s entry onto the National Register of Historic Places April 11, 2014.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Charter Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery, 6, The Department of Defense (DoD), through the Department of the Army, . . . and will ensure compliance with the requirements of the FACA, the Government in the Sunshine Act of 1976 (5 U.S.C. Section 552b, as amended, “the Sunshine Act”), Federal statutes and regulations and DoD policies and procedures.
8 September 2022, The Naming Commission Final Report to the United States Congress Part III: Remaining Department of Defense Assets, p. 15.
9 87 Federal Register 64019 (Oct. 21, 2022).
10 Id. at 64020.
11 Written Statements to the ACANC Nov. 7-8, 2022 meeting.
12 Charter Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery, 6, The Department of Defense (DoD), through the Department of the Army, . . . and will ensure compliance with the requirements of the FACA, the Government in the Sunshine Act of 1976 (5. U.S.C. Section 552b, as amended, “the Sunshine Act”), government Federal statutes and regulations and DoD policies and procedures.
13 Charter, Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery available at:
Charter (arlingtoncemetery.mil).
14 41 C.F.R. 102-3. 120.
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